…we'll be building starships by the time the next total solar eclipse crosses Arizona.
Obligatory Yearly Hand Held Photo Of Orion
The iPhone cameras really are getting better. For many iterations it would've been impossible for me to get a clear shot while hand held.
Black Holes
Beautiful.
Wow.
Prathamesh Jaju, a 16-year-old boy from Pune, shot around 50,000 pictures and stitched them together to get the clearest and sharpest image of the moon. It took him around 40 hours to process the images and videos. Speaking to ANI, Jaju said, "I captured the image on May 3 at 1am. (via Tumblr)
Obligatory Eclipse Photo
Binoculars projected onto a sheet of paper and photographed with my iPhone. Better than nothing…
Something Not Horrible For a Change
From Mock Paper Scissors:
This picture is from the James Webb Space Telescope and it depicts the birth of stars:
The first anniversary image from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope displays star birth like it's never been seen before, full of detailed, impressionistic texture. The subject is the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth. It is a relatively small, quiet stellar nursery, but you'd never know it from Webb's chaotic close-up. Jets bursting from young stars crisscross the image, impacting the surrounding interstellar gas and lighting up molecular hydrogen, shown in red. Some stars display the telltale shadow of a circumstellar disk, the makings of future planetary systems.
I know everything is terrible and we're all doomed, and the Republican Treachery (is that redundant?) or Stupidity (definitely redundant) will never end and we're totally eff'ed in the dark, but this picture smacked my gob, and gave me just a tingle of the original Star Trek 1960s optimism. Y'all Qaeda and their theocrat supporters all say we are fallen angels and that Gawd hates us sinners and blah-blah-blah, but I prefer to think that Sir Terry's Risen Apes theory is better.
For Scale
Life Imitates Art
Last year astronomers at NASA announced they had discovered a sextuple star system, i.e. six stars that perform an intricate dance around a common center of gravity.
I find this fascinating because this is exactly the type of system described in Isaac Asimov's classic work, Nightfall.
In 1941, Astounding Science Fiction magazine published a short story by a little-known writer named Isaac Asimov. The story was called Nightfall, and many years later it has long been recognized as a classic; its author a legend. The Gran Master of Science Fiction eventually teamed with Robert Silverberg, one of the field's top award-winning authors, to explore and expand an apocalyptic tale that is more spellbinding today than ever before—Nightfall: The Novel.
Imagine living on a planet with six suns that never experiences darkness. Imagine never having seen the stars. Then, one by one the suns start to set, gradually leading into darkness for the first time ever. Kalgash is a world on the edge of chaos, torn between the madness of religious fanaticism and the unyielding rationalism of scientists. Lurking beneath it all is a collective, instinctual fear of the darkness. For Kalgash knows only the perpetual light of day; to its inhabitants, a gathering twilight portends unspeakable horror. And only a handful of people on the planet are prepared to face the truth, their six suns are setting all at once for the first time in over two thousand years, signaling the end of civilization as it explodes in the awesome splendor of Nightfall.
Encompassing the psychology of disaster, the tenacity of the human spirit, and, ultimately, the regenerative power of hope, Nightfall is a tale rich in character and suspense that only the unique collaboration of Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg could create.
More than one attempt has been made to bring this story to the screen, each time resulting in utter failure. My take on the most recent one is here.
Andromeda Moves In
Not that humanity will even be around to witness this, but these images show what things may look like as the inevitable collision and merger of the Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies takes place.
The last two images are a bit optimistic because the Earth will have long since been consumed by the sun as it enters its red giant phase in around 5 billion years.
In Case You've Ever Wondered…
…how the plane of our solar system is oriented to the plane of the Milky Way.
Because I have.
But then, I'm an astronomy geek. Have been since I was a wee young thing. But I'd always wondered how the solar system was oriented in regard to the galaxy itself, since it seemed improbable that everything was oriented in the same direction.
Our Colorful Moon
Yes, they're real.
Remind Me Again…
…why your god is so concerned about what I do with my penis?
A Moment of Zen
From daryavaseum:
This is my clearest and sharpest moon image i ever captured, i stacked (133,000) frames and 147GB worth of data to achieve this. I've been working on this project since 4 days ago. This image takes up to 22 hours of editing and stacking since the amount of data was massive, also you can see the planet mars as an apparent size compared with the moon which is composed image. Lastly, i hope you guys like it and enjoy the details.
Gear: celestron nexstar 8se
Camera: ZWO AS1120mc
Color: canon eos 1200D
Software: autostacker, astro surface, registax, photoshop.
The James Webb telescope turns its eye close to home by capturing its first image of Neptune, revealing the ice giant planet in a whole new light. This is the clearest view of this peculiar planet's rings in more than 30 years.
The new image, taken by Webb's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), shows the crisp view of the planet's dynamic rings. The Webb images also clearly show Neptune's fainter dust bands.
Methane gas found inside Neptune is so strongly absorbing that the planet is quite dark at Webb wavelengths (0.6 to 5 microns) except where high-altitude clouds are present. Such clouds are prominent as bright streaks and spots, which reflect sunlight.
Webb also captured seven of Neptune's 14 known moons. Dominating this Webb portrait of Neptune is a very bright point of light sporting the signature diffraction spikes seen in many of Webb's images; it's not a star, but Neptune's most unusual moon, Triton.
Triton reflects an ~70 percent of the sunlight that hits it and orbits Neptune in a backwards orbit, leading astronomers to believe this moon was a Kuiper Belt object that was captured by Neptune. Additional Webb studies of Triton and Neptune are planned this year.
[Source]
Nerd Humor
And Your God Worries About Where I Put My Penis?
While Planetary Formation is Unlikely…
…around any star in a globular cluster, can you imagine what the night sky would look like on one? I mean hundreds of thousands of stars packed into a sphere 150 light years across, with upward of 100 stars jammed into an area 1 light year in diameter. (For comparison, the sun's nearest neighbor is a bit over 4 light years distant.)
See: Isaac Asimov's Nightfall.
Feeling Insignificant Yet?
Earth in relation to Jupiter's Great Red Spot
For Those Of You Who Missed It (Like Me)
The great planetary alignment from a few nights ago.
Apparently This Was The View to the East This Morning
I would've loved to have seen this, but…
(a) I do not have an unobstructed view of the eastern sky.
(b) I'm not getting up at 4 am for anything.
Putting Things Into Perspective
The outline of the continental United States superimposed over the great hexagon at Saturn's North Pole:
If you're not humbled by that, here's the entire North American continent next to Jupiter's Great Red Spot:
But Christians, please…tell me again how your god is so obsessed with where I put my penis. I'll wait.
But Human Beings Are the Center of the Universe…
(And the sun in this illustration is twice the size it should be. If the scale were correct it would occupy less than a single pixel.)
All The Colors of the…Moon?
Science!
Take a good look: this is the black hole at the center of our galaxy.
In the inset image, gas in the glowing orange ring surrounds the black hole's event horizon, a boundary from which nothing can escape. The ring is created by light bending in the intense gravity around Sagittarius A*, which has a mass some four million times greater than our Sun. This groundbreaking image of Sagittarius A* was taken by the Event Horizon Telescope team with data from telescopes around the world. After the EHT's iconic image of M87*, released in 2019, this is only the second time a supermassive black hole has been directly observed with its shadow.
The wider look at the space around Sagittarius A* includes data contributed by several NASA missions. The orange specks and purple tendrils were captured in infrared light by the Hubble Space Telescope, and the blue clouds represent data from our orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory.
Fall in to the whole story: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/images/sagittarius-a-nasa-telescopes-support-event-horizon-telescope-in-studying-milky-ways.html
[Source]
A Trick of Light and Shadow
"Explanation: Why does Saturn appear so big? It doesn't – what is pictured are foreground clouds on Earth crossing in front of the Moon. The Moon shows a slight crescent phase with most of its surface visible by reflected Earthlight known as ashen glow. The Sun directly illuminates the brightly lit lunar crescent from the bottom, which means that the Sun must be
below the horizon and so the image was taken before sunrise. This double take-inducing picture was captured on 2019 December 24, two days before the Moon slid in front of the Sun to create a solar eclipse. In the foreground, lights from small Guatemalan towns are visible behind the huge yolcano Pacaya."
[Source]
I Had This…
…or some variation thereof, on my bedroom wall all through grade school. I took to drawing my own version of the planets—no doubt as fanciful as these representations, never dreaming that during the course of my life we'd actually see each one up close via robotic probes!
This Blows Me Away
We Are So Small
This is What…
…I would imagine the night sky looks like on a planet at the edge of a globular cluster.